Review our startup: AppStoreHQ -- Mobile app search/discovery

http://www.appstorehq.com

by iseff • 17 years ago

17 10 17 years ago

iseff2• 17 years ago

Hey all,

Hoping to get some feedback on our new site. We've been launched for a bit now, and are finally ready to start showing off to the world. Hopefully you'll have some comments, especially if you're an app developer.

We're working on mobile app search and discovery, since we believe the app store is far too hit driven. We want to make finding the perfect app easy. And, as a developer, we want you to be able to market and distribute your app more effectively.

We've done some things that I think are pretty interesting. Here's a quick run-down:

1) "Hottest Apps" -- We index many different blogs that review apps and any review they write gets linked to from our site. Then we use that as an input to create a list of what apps are currently the hottest. We also publish the most talked about apps to our Twitter account (http://twitter.com/appstorehq).

2) Sponsored Results -- App developers can purchase sponsored results for any category. Right now they're $10/week or $35/month.

3) Saving Apps to your Amazon Universal Wish List -- If you want to remember an app, but don't want to buy it yet, you can save it to your Amazon Wish List and come back to buy it later.

4) App badges for your site -- You can embed a badge on any site and write a review of an app. We'll find that review (because you embedded the badge) and we'll link to it from the app's detail page. It gives your visitors up-to-date information about the app, and gives you more traffic. A win-win, we think.

5) Search filters -- we think we have the best all around mobile app search on the web now. You can drill down by any combination of Search Query, Category, Price Range, and Rating. Soon we'll be adding Release Date to that as well.

Overall, we're really trying to help app developers with app distribution (and other problems) and help app consumers find the right apps. So, if you have any suggestions, please let us know!

We're also testing the waters with white-label search. For example, if you run a blog which talks about mobile apps, we'd provide a white-label version of our index and share any revenue you provide... If you'd be interested in something like this, let us know.

mrbgty2• 17 years ago

Doesn't #1 contribute to making it even more hit driven?

crashdev• 17 years ago

Good point. AppStoreHQ's 'Hottest' list is built on streaming blog post discovery, and the stream is what's on the home page (kind of like Hype Machine does for music) - so any app that gets a mention from any of 70+ "canonical" blogs, or any blog that drops an AppStoreHQ review widget into its review - will show up in the stream.

So yeah, you have to at least have gotten some traction somewhere to get into the stream, but the bar is pretty low. (That said, about half the apps in the App Store have never even received a user rating - they're still in AppStoreHQ's search results, but they'll need a little love to get out of the basement).

raptrex• 17 years ago

On the image hoverovers, can you position them to the right of the thumbnails, right now it covers the thumbnails and i want to just move my mouse to the right instead of moving away and moving it to the next picture

pchristensen• 17 years ago

Even without all the extra features, having an app store browser that doesn't live in iTunes is fantastic. I think this has a lot of potential.

If you can get people to enter which apps they have, you could do some sort of recommendation engine. IE People who used this app also liked this one...

iseff2• 17 years ago

Thanks! We definitely have personalization features that we want to build, right now there's just so much to do. :) Promise we'll get to it soon, though!

nc• 17 years ago

The site looks interesting. Do you have any page view figures related to advertising?

Found one issue: our app (Movies Now!) is indicated as being released on May 13th. However it was actually released on the 27th May.

http://www.appstorehq.com/moviesnow-free-iphone-34716/app

MotorMouths• 17 years ago

Nice site. I've been hunting for good executions of this idea. Thus far these have impressed me most:

http://www.freshapps.com http://www.apptism.com http://iphone.iusethis.com

But yours is right in there in the mix. Add a recommendation engine, and you're really on to something. Good luck!

oppegard• 17 years ago

I want to sort apps by highest reviewed followed by descending sort of number of reviews. E.g., I'm more interested in apps that have 200 5-star reviews than apps with 2 5-star reviews.

Review our startup: AppStoreHQ -- Mobile app search/discovery

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